REVIEW - Rosewater

Quite why an Iranian-Canadian journalist living in the UK warranted a Mexican actor to play him in film is beyond me.

I can perhaps understand why talk show host and general mirth-maker John Stewart chose to make this his screenwriting and directing debut. The journalist Maziar Bahari was arrested and interrogated in an Iranian prison for four months with part of the evidence used against an interview he did on John Stewart's TV show wherein jokes were made about him being a CIA spy.

The famous Iranian lack of a funny bone meant they took those "jokes" seriously, but either the treatment Bahari received was nowhere near as "brutal" as the media would have us believe, or John Stewart decided to play this one straight and with little dramatic action but this was all too pedestrian for me.

I hope I'm not making light of Bahari's suffering, but blame John Stewart.